(In reply to Holger Weiß from comment #17)
> I'm one of the maintainers of the original Nagios Plugins project that
> has now been forced to change its name. So, I'm obviously biased---just
> like Andy Brist, but from the other side of the fence.
>
> I guess the answer to the question of who forked whom isn't immediately
> obvious, especially if you're not involved in the mess. It'll depend on
> how exactly you define a "fork", and it may not be all that relevant for
> the decision on how to proceed with the RedHat/Fedora packaging anyway.
>
> Let me just add my view on the current situation. I'd invite Andy (or
> anyone else) to let us know if he thinks I got any of my facts wrong.
> Hopefully that'll help RedHat/Fedora with making an informed decision on
> which of the two upstreams to use for packaging, or whether to package
> both.
I'm starting to feel more and more strongly after reading about the issue and researching the history that both nagios-plugins and monitoring-plugins can and should both be included in Fedora + EPEL. monitoring-plugins can have a Conflicts with nagios-plugins and vice versa. At some point if one of the projects becomes canonical and the community has agreed it has succeeded then we can just add an Obseletes for the other package to the package that has grown to be successful.
>
> Over the past several years, the Nagios Plugins project was maintained
> by a team of volunteers not affiliated with Nagios Enterprises.
> However, back in 2011, we transferred the "nagios-plugins.org" domain to
> Nagios Enterprises on their request. This transfer was coupled with an
> agreement that the actual maintainers would continue to run the project
> independently.¹ However, a few days ago, Nagios Enterprises copied most
> of our web site and changed the DNS records to point to their web space
> instead, which now serves a slightly modified version of our site
> including the tarballs we created. This was done without prior notice.
> From what I understand², their reasoning for this move was that they
> weren't happy with us mentioning competing monitoring products on our
> home page (please correct me if I'm wrong, Andy).³
>
> So, we now have two upstreams:
>
> One driven by the team that lost its domain, but that did the actual
> maintenance work in the past, and that will continue to maintain the
> same project with the same infrastructure (GitHub repos/trackers,
> mailing lists, automated test builds, and so on) under the new name.
>
> The other one is driven by a team that seems to be "new" indeed:
> Personally I don't recall *any* contributions of *any* of the new team
> members (in fact I didn't even know their names before reading them on
> the new Nagios Plugins web site). Or can you point me to just a single
> patch or mailing list posting of any of the members of the new team,
> Andy? Don't get me wrong: You guys may well be into Nagios Plugins
> development. But for outsiders like me, the fact that you didn't show
> any public activity in this area so far might add a bit of uncertainty
> regarding the future of your project.
I'm happy to help you work toward a resolution of this issue in EPEL/Fedora, but please try to keep stuff like this last paragraph on the mail lists where other discussions are happening. They don't really help move things forward.
>
> In short, I see two differences to a "prototypical" fork:
>
> 1) The project that has been forked doesn't own the domain name.
> 2) The project that performed the fork did so without showing any previous
> development activities.
Right, agreed on both counts that those two make this fork a little different. Even still, there's no doubt that both can co-exist in the same distro despite seemingly severe contention between the upstream projects.
>
> ¹ https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/news/domain-transfer.html
> ² https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/archive/devel/2014-January/009420.html
> ³ https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/archive/devel/2014-January/009428.html